For many years the greatest challenge facing the UN was simply to be noticed.
Year in year out things happened that the Big Powers, especially the United
States, did not want considered, let alone dealt with, by the U.N. Thus
the war in Vietnam, one of the most urgent and disastrous episodes in the
last 50 years, was not even discussed by the Security Council. Nor was this
a unique instance: many crises were ignored, either because they could not
be resolved by the U.N. or because the nuclear powers wished to avoid
examination of their own responsibility for particular actions.

The root of many failures of the U.N. lies in the schizophrenia exhibited in
the Charter. This gives the world political body the responsibility for the
maintenance of international peace and security but does so after founding the
organization on the membership of sovereign states. That is to say upon
the individual power-structures which are recognised because of their right and
power to wage war. These are incompatible. The Charter bans the use
of armed force but every member bases its right to exist upon that capacity.

Equally, the Charter proclaims the right and duties of 'we the peoples' - fully
democratic in theory - but in practice it gives no powers to the people or to their
elected representatives. Instead, the organization 'a trade-union of
governments', is in the hands of governments and these may be
dictatorships or oligarchies. And finally, having declared the equality of
all member-states, the Charter then endows five of these, which nowadays happen
to be nuclear-wielding, with additional powers. Totally schizoid.

So, the challenge now facing the United Nations is to turn democratic theory
into practice and make itself truly responsive to the needs and wishes of the
people of the world. The first of these needs is to establish the end to
wars that in 1945 the Preamble to the Charter declared was the aim but which has
proved the greatest political failure of the United Nations. While the social
and welfare arm, constituted by the Specialized Agencies, has often been highly
successful, dealing with violence has not. Each year some three wars have
broken out and if world war has been avoided, it is hard to be sure the U.N. has
had much to do with that important and positive fact. Instead, we are
still in peril of just such an outcome; and a world stocked with
enough nuclear weapons to kill everyone and everything on the planet a
score of times over denies any suggestion of success in the ending of war.
Instead, after 50 years, we now have a system of American world government that
overbears us all. Witness the Gulf War and the decade-long bombing of
Iraq. We have a crude and ineffective world government that must be
changed. Other nations will not accept it indefinitely.

So the United Nations must democratise in order to fulfil its mandate and become
consistent with its chief purpose. The challenge is to transform the U.N.
into a proper democratic system of global governance. Fortunately, we have
to hand the most important component installed since the original foundation of
the U.N. itself. With the forthcoming ratification of the International
Criminal Court there will be put in place one of the essential building-blocks
of a truly effective system of world governance. It is symbolic of
reluctance of the U.S. government to relinquish its self-appointed task of
global policeman that the administration of George Bush has done its level best
to sabotage the setting-up of the Court.

When the United Nations finally recognises its task of bringing about this new
global dispensation there will be several more particular institutions to be
installed and working. One will be a way of ensuring and supervising
national disarmament sufficient to make peacekeeping principally a matter of
policing and not of fighting. That will need to be completely
non-national, not reliant, as at present, upon the rag-and-bobtail assemblies of
contingents sent - and sometimes withdrawn - at the whim of nation-state
governments. This is not so far even seriously being attempted.

A further need will be some form of independent financing for United National
purposes. Fortunately, there is now serious discussion of one possible
source of funding. This, known as the Tobin Tax, is a proposal to take a
very small bite out of the enormous sums of money transferred across frontiers
daily or more often nightly between the markets and banks of the five
continents. After several years of tentative discussion, there is growing
support, despite opposition, from financiers, for some such method of collecting
money for international purposes. Other further reforms will be necessary
but the essential is to recognise, particularly at the present time, that our
world needs law, not war, and that unless we institute a system based on law we
shall have to suffer that alternative.

The challenge facing the United Nations is how to reform itself in order to do
what Europe has shown can be done, unite and end war as a means of settling
disputes.

John Roberts 10/01
(retired history professor now in southern England)

THE ANTIDOTE TO RACISM AND NATIONALISM - WORLD CITIZENSHIP

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